WebTest combineded with Cactus?I agree with you Eric. It is difficult to
maintain the web-tests with dynamic/changing/growing applications, but I haven't
used Cactus.

Are you just looking for a more generic interface to the Canoo webtest engine?

One that would be able to start a test(s) which are defined in ant.xml files and
gather the results in via a java object, (or xml?) of some sort.

1.) Cactus Starts 2.) Cactus Calls Canoo Interface (any number of times) 3.) Canoo interface starts Ant 4.) Canoo interface gathers results from the test and returns them 5.) Catctus does what ever it needs to with the results

I am guessing the only thing that is currently missing is a nice interface, and
perhaps a Cactus friendly object to return.

Is that anything like what you are looking for Eric? ----- Original Message ----- From: EPu...@upstate.com To: webt...@gate.canoo.com Sent: Friday, July 18, 2003 4:46 AM Subject: [Webtest] WebTest combineded with Cactus?

Hi all,

I want to throw out this idea and see what people think.

The Problem: I used to use WebTest extensively to test my sites, but the cost of maintaining
the scripts, and running them by hand become to much work. I started using
Cactus to test my business objects, and that worked well. I then started to test
my webapps using Cactus to simulate a browser. This would work okay for one
page, but if you wanted to test a couple of pages (a la WebTest) it became a
maintence nightmare. What was great about WebTest was that the scripts are easy
to run. What is hard is that they aren't integrated with the rest of my
build->test->continous integration regime using junit and cactus.

What I Want: Use Webtest from inside Cactus to test my webapps from a browser perspective.

I noticed that Sigi's webtest plugin is able to format the webtest output in
something that looks very close to a junit style report. It seems to me that
similar to the way that Ant runs testcases that execercise various build.xml
test files, I could have a CactusWebTestTestCase that would run in container the
webtest scripts. The errors etc coming from WebTest could be treated as Junit
style assert's and then be formatted using the standard cactus tools... Which
means that when, in Maven, I click on cactus-reports, the results of my webtest
scripts will be there!

The other reason to use Cactus, instead of the maven webtest plugin is that
using Cactus I can configure my environment before running the scripts to have
everything I need. Preset the database, generate any files, etc.. And the script
can just reference http://localhost...

Opinions?

Eric